Changing electricity supplier
Posted: Mon 08 Oct 2018 19:02
Has anyone else changed their supplier of electricity?
I've just gone through the process today, a visit to the dentist would have been more pleasurable.
A few months ago I registered on the website for the Perpignan group, which claimed to have negotiated a 16% discount for people living in the area. Unfortunately they turned out to be inept, their website would not recognise my point of delivery, their promised 'phone back' never happened and their guaranteed 24 hour email response was non-existant.
I gave up on them and looked at Leclerc who claim to offer 20% of your electricity spend back in vouchers. Strangely when you look at their offering, the prices after the 20% are hardly different to those that include 15% from other suppliers.
For a while I thought that they must do arithmetic differently in France to the rest of the world but it turns out the clue to their bizarre calculations is in the TTC bit. Electricity here has a price per KW hour but then departmental and commune taxes are added which of course are not subject to any discount. Because these vary throughout France, the providers seem to make an assumption for the calculation and so the numbers never add up.
I finally lost the will to live and went with CDiscount, mainly because they called me and their fictitious numbers looked better than any one else's.
At the end of it all, I did the sums and actually saved about 6%. Needless to say, the contract arrived and was wrong, I told them 5 times that I have an 18KVA supply which appeared as 15KVA on the contract and their proposed monthly payment was a good 50€ a month less than it should be. The cynic in me could easily believe that the low figure was intended to induce me.
Despite giving them my exact consumption of electricity over the last 12 months, they insisted on estimating my consumption based on how we heat the house and how many fridges we have.
The UK press has been full of stories recently about providers benefitting because people can't be bothered to swap. If my experience is anything to go by then I am not surprised.
I've just gone through the process today, a visit to the dentist would have been more pleasurable.
A few months ago I registered on the website for the Perpignan group, which claimed to have negotiated a 16% discount for people living in the area. Unfortunately they turned out to be inept, their website would not recognise my point of delivery, their promised 'phone back' never happened and their guaranteed 24 hour email response was non-existant.
I gave up on them and looked at Leclerc who claim to offer 20% of your electricity spend back in vouchers. Strangely when you look at their offering, the prices after the 20% are hardly different to those that include 15% from other suppliers.
For a while I thought that they must do arithmetic differently in France to the rest of the world but it turns out the clue to their bizarre calculations is in the TTC bit. Electricity here has a price per KW hour but then departmental and commune taxes are added which of course are not subject to any discount. Because these vary throughout France, the providers seem to make an assumption for the calculation and so the numbers never add up.
I finally lost the will to live and went with CDiscount, mainly because they called me and their fictitious numbers looked better than any one else's.
At the end of it all, I did the sums and actually saved about 6%. Needless to say, the contract arrived and was wrong, I told them 5 times that I have an 18KVA supply which appeared as 15KVA on the contract and their proposed monthly payment was a good 50€ a month less than it should be. The cynic in me could easily believe that the low figure was intended to induce me.
Despite giving them my exact consumption of electricity over the last 12 months, they insisted on estimating my consumption based on how we heat the house and how many fridges we have.
The UK press has been full of stories recently about providers benefitting because people can't be bothered to swap. If my experience is anything to go by then I am not surprised.